Scenic Hudson celebrates 50 years of capturing beauty

If you expected calendar art in a back-patting eco-progression to be the theme of Scenic Hudson’s “On Time and Place: Celebrating Scenic Hudson’s 50 years,” back up. Start over.

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By Deborah Medenbach

recordonline.com

By Deborah Medenbach

Posted Feb. 22, 2013 at 2:00 AM

By Deborah Medenbach
Posted Feb. 22, 2013 at 2:00 AM

» Social News

If you expected calendar art in a back-patting eco-progression to be the theme of Scenic Hudson’s “On Time and Place: Celebrating Scenic Hudson’s 50 years,” back up. Start over.

True to its gritty foundation as the grass-roots organization that protected Storm King Mountain and gave a legal foothold for the environmental movement, Scenic Hudson brings a dozen top photographers together for an homage not only to the Hudson River’s beauty, but also to illustrate the conservation work ahead.

“While we knew the story of Scenic Hudson’s origins, when we went through detailed records we were especially impressed with the passion Scenic Hudson’s founders felt for Storm King Mountain, and how this passion compelled them to launch and lead such a vigorous campaign to protect it,” said Jay Burgess of Scenic Hudson. “Long before the mainstream environmental movement took root, they realized the vital importance of conserving nature and connecting people to it.”

Curator Kate Menconeri, former program director at the Center for Photography in Woodstock and currently working at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, selected 34 images by professional photographers for the exhibit. Her choices include Greg Miller’s riverbank panoramas, Jerry Freedner’s deliciously textural “Corn Harvest” and Carolyn Marks Blackwood’s pattern-punctuated “Bird Series.” Menconeri was faced with an unexpected dilemma as the call for submissions brought in hundreds of images that traced the beauty and history along the river’s banks.

Menconeri handled the grassroots groundswell of images by creating at each exhibit site an iPad kiosk, allowing viewers to see Scenic Hudson’s activism timeline (viewable at sh50.org), historical images and submissions from hundreds of talented area photographers.

“Like Scenic Hudson’s founding itself, everyone has been touched by the river. The images provide a historical context, from fishing, to cement plants under construction, to people in the 1940s swimming at river beaches,” Menconeri said. A special curatorial focus was to select images that showed progress and future work in specific iconic places.

“We have the image of Olana, where Scenic Hudson protected 1,400 acres of viewshed, but also in the distance some smoke stacks that show potential threats to this romantic landscape,” Menconeri said.

The exhibit first opened in January in Hudson. Its stop in Kingston is the only Ulster County site before it travels to Beacon, Nyack, Westchester and then New York City to help celebrate Grand Central Station’s 100-year anniversary.

“Our advisers helped shape the concept of what kind of show this could be and where it would go on its way down the Valley,” Burgess said of the team that included Metropolitan Museum of Art Photography curator Malcolm Daniel, museum consultant William Burback, and photographers Annie Leibovitz and Dawn Watson.

In keeping with Scenic Hudson’s mission to honor its past but also progress, Dr. Sacha Spector, the organization’s director of conservation science, will give a talk titled “The Opportunity of a Lifetime: Climate Change and Sustainability in the Hudson Valley” at 6 p.m. March 7 at the Johnston Museum’s gallery.